


let your god rebuild this roof

by ravencallsign (droneheads)



Category: The Poppy War - R. F. Kuang
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Complicated Relationships, I JUST REALIZED THAT AO3 DOESN'T HAVE THE TRIFECTA LISTED LMFAO ITS WHAT THEY DESERVE, Multi, Um., Unhealthy Relationships, i was like should i put unrequited on here but then i was like it should STAY unrequited. by god, me on the street corner like hey anyone wanna read about, sorry about the brain worms. they're biting my gray matter, uh war criminals that have feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-13
Updated: 2021-02-13
Packaged: 2021-03-13 07:47:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,705
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29398593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/droneheads/pseuds/ravencallsign
Summary: what happens, then, when you are much too old to change it, and it is too much to want it? you have burnt yourself quite badly; if there is a difference between the freezing and the burning.(or, ziya and daji and riga, and how the brightest stars are just burning balls of gas in the clear cold sky, in the end.)
Relationships: Jiang Ziya/Yin Riga, Su Daji & Jiang Ziya, Su Daji & Yin Riga, Su Daji/Yin Riga
Comments: 1
Kudos: 10





	let your god rebuild this roof

**Author's Note:**

> -this is so long. and so bad  
> -me three weeks ago: what if war criminals had feelings  
> -me now, finishing this at 4 in the morning: by god, the war criminals have feelings  
> -i don't remember anything from the first two books feel free to yell at me in the comments section im addicted to getting AO3 emails. or just read it as an AU. 
> 
> -*thinks about doomed triads* *dies* *wakes up at 10 AM* *repeat*  
> -title from the mountain goats' their gods do not have surgeons

Ziya is so skinny when Daji first meets him she can see his joints clicking together under sunburnt skin. 

(Two years ago, she might have found it unbearably grotesque. Now, it barely makes her stomach turn.)

He does not greet her when he notices her at the edge of the muddy field, just stares at her unabashedly, eyes harder than a boy’s should ever be, almost overlarge in that skeletal face.

“Hello,” Daji says, because she is eleven years old and she may have seen her entire family bleed their lifeblood, thick and fast and dark, into fields and floorboards, but she has not yet learned how to burn the edges of pain out of herself, cauterize the holes in her heart into ridged scarred skin. 

Ziya shuffles closer, then, eyes still hard and distrustful and strangely light, almost reflecting the color of the sky, the color of the eye of the storm, the color of ice before an avalanche. 

“I need a favor,” Daji says, curls a hand into a tattered tunic grey with washing. “I heard you could do it.” 

“Who told you?” Ziya says, and she can see his voice rattling against his ribs like a caged thing. 

In answer, she nods at a cluster of boys on the other side of the field. 

He looks at her for the first time, then- looks at her fully, with those strangely colorless eyes, and she has to suppress a shiver as she looks back into them- here they are like chips of ice, here they are like a clear mountain stream, here they are nothing at all. 

“Alright,” he says finally. “What do I get for it?” 

Daji uncurls her other hand to show him, then- a hard, stale, coarse-grain _mantou_ from breakfast, squashed on one side from how tightly she’d been gripping it. 

Ziya’s whole face sharpens at once, and then hardens again, after a moment. 

“Two,” he says. “This one today and one tomorrow.” 

Daji is eleven years old and she has walked through fields so slick with blood that the crops planted there grew lustrous and tall from the coppery bloom of it. 

“Two,” she agrees. 

-

Daji is the clever one, they will all say, much later. Daji is the clever one, and Ziya is the wise one, and Riga is the brave one. 

Daji is the clever one, then. She is clever because she learns early on how to see people in all of their wound-tight workings, because she sees nervy-drawn shoulders and bottomless eyes and limbs that won’t stop twitching and it is like she draws something up and out of them, touches them once, here, and they fall open, jaws slack, eyes dull, touches them twice, here, and they are disparate parts at her feet. 

Daji is the clever one. She is cold-forged and cold-given and she has never yielded once before and she thinks for a very long time that she never has. 

Daji is the clever one, then. There is nothing in cleverness about being wise. 

Ziya is the wise one, then. Ziya is the wise one because he may not be able to turn people into parts but the color of his eyes is always ever only the color of anyone else’s. Here is Ziya, nine years old and war-starved and still shaking out crumbs from his too-thin hands to feed the rats. Here is Ziya, affable and agreeable one moment and then bringing the earth to heel the next. 

Ziya is the wise one. He is watery steel, infinite small folds melting into each other, just on this side of brittle, stretching, almost burning his fingers on the white-hot flame but not quite, almost always not quite. 

Ziya is the wise one, then. There is nothing in wisdom about being brave. 

Riga is the brave one, then. Daji may bring flesh and Ziya may bring the earth to beg at their feet but Riga brings them. Riga only uses a sword still because the body is still too soft to cut through flesh at most points. Riga only uses the two of them in the end because the ways that mortals can cut through each other are infinitely more interesting than how steel does it. 

Riga is the brave one. He is the sure-thing, the once-forged thing, plunged sure and steady and shining into fire and ice and back again- or at least that is what they all think, for a very long time. 

(Riga is the hammer. Riga is the butcher. Riga is the fire. Riga brings himself down on the anvil and he rings harmonious and dreadful in measure and he laughs.)

Riga is the brave one, then. 

There is nothing in any of them about being good.

-

“Why?” Daji asks Ziya one day, crouches down next to him in the trampled grass and watches him sprinkle crumbs into the green-brown morass. 

He shrugs, and in that moment his eyes are the pale gold of wheat. 

“Why not?” 

-

Daji is fifteen now to Ziya’s thirteen and she is sharp and quick and clever but she is those things in wartime, among a thicket of people who are also those things but are also older and stronger than her. 

Ziya is thirteen but he is so small from lack of food that he could pass for eleven and when she lays a hand on his back she can still count the bony knobs of his spine in clear succession. 

This is the thing of it. Five years ago she would rather have died. Now she stands in the cook-tent after hours, hands curled into her tunic to stop them from shaking. She has not eaten, then, for three days. 

The cook turns to look at her, and leers. “What can I do for you, miss?” 

-

Riga is sixteen and stands head-and-shoulders above some of the men in the camp, walks with the authority that taking up space gives a person. He is skinny, but it is a boy-skinny, the skin stretched strange over his bones only the shape of growing into- never hunger. 

“Kneel,” he says, something sharp dancing in his eyes as he says it and everyone scrambles to obey, and Daji fumbles for Ziya, then, in the rush, and he is- 

He is standing so close to Riga that he could reach out and touch him, rest light fingers on the hard lacquer of his armor, and he has a smile on his face the wrong side of insolence. 

“Ziya,” Daji hisses, because Riga has a sword on his hip and two more in his eyes and Ziya is less than nothing, compared to him, carved and made whelp of hunger, and she closes her eyes and waits for the wet spray of it to hit her face. 

“Kneel,” Riga says again, and there is something almost uncertain in his tone, colorless and wavering. 

“Not to you,” Ziya says, says it so easily, like he is talking with anyone else and not a prodigal son. 

Riga’s hand tightens around the hilt of his sword, then, and Daji flinches violently, and-

It does not come. His sword is still in its sheath and Ziya is still whole and not rent in two and bleeding out into dust and earth. There is something new and raw in Riga’s face, then, something inquisitive and searching and wanting. 

(Hunger and love might be the same thing in different lights.)

He turns abruptly, walks away from the assembled group and as soon as his back is turned Daji is scrambling towards Ziya, grabbing him by bony shoulders and looking into eyes the color of water at the bottom of a tidepool. 

“ _What is wrong with you_ ,” she hisses, because he is still smiling and he should be dead. “Why did you do that?” 

“He wasn’t going to kill me,” Ziya says, smiles at her wide and too sure. It looks out of place on his thin face, breaking brittle onto his hunger-cut angles. “Not for a long time yet.”

Daji scoffs, lips twisting. “He might, next time, if you pull that stunt again.” 

“We’ll see,” Ziya says, and there is something new about him, too. 

-

Riga does not come in battle-armor, this time, still strides into their camp like the most solid thing there and stops right where Ziya stands waiting, hands hanging loose at his sides, back straight, cocksure smile on his face. 

“You,” Riga says, and Ziya cocks his head, strange and birdlike, and says nothing. 

Riga draws his sword then, in one practiced motion, and Daji looks at his long-fingered hands, how they grip the hilt, loose and easy and born with it, and a coil of something dark and fearful wriggles up from her stomach. 

“Come on, then,” Riga says, the raw thing on his face from before now stitched into something vulgar and slavering and Ziya does nothing but shake his hair out of his eyes and grin ever-wider. 

Riga slashes down, so fast his sword is nothing but a shining blur, and Ziya darts away, skips to his right at the last second, and the blade cleaves through nothing but air. 

Riga’s brow furrows. Ziya’s eyes are the color of the noonday sun, so bright he almost hurts to look at, and he is smiling wider than Daji has ever seen him. 

Riga slashes again, and again, and again, and each time Ziya darts or ducks or weaves and the steel bite of the sword never so much as grazes him and his smile grows wider and more brittle until it looks like it’s about to crack his face in two. 

“Is that all?” he says, and Riga’s grip on his sword tightens and he slashes again and Ziya laughs this time, short and raspy, flits out of the way again and then Riga whirls and his blade scissors through the air, whistling like it’s alive, before he has time to move. 

There is a dull gonging sound, like the ring of a cracked bell. 

The flat of the blade is lying shining and still against Ziya’s raised forearm and as Daji watches, the thing in Riga’s face unstitches, unravels, falls back raw and open. 

He throws his head back and laughs, high and bright and so achingly boylike in that moment, and after another Ziya laughs too, low and rasping, the sound shaking his ribcage, and the light strikes the angle of the blade between them at just the right moment, then, and Daji is no artist but something in her aches for ink and brush. 

Riga turns his dark head and smiles at her and in the light she cannot see the teeth behind it and it buoys her up in the brilliant light of him, brilliant and golden and worthy and he is so beautiful she cannot breathe. 

He lowers his sword, walks towards her and up close he is like something out of a legend, out of a story, walked out of black ink and white page into the hole in her heart. 

“Yin,” he says, “Yin Riga.” 

“I know,” she says. 

He laughs again, then, and it is softer and lighter and it feels like it is only for her, right there. 

“Su Daji,” she says, crosses her arm and tilts her chin and tries to look colder than she feels. 

“A pleasure,” he says, and her mind says _highborn flattery_ and her pulse says _but it is working, is it not?_

“The same,” she says. 

He nods at Ziya. “What is he?” 

“He’s a child,” she snaps, and the gold of him rubs off a bit. “He’s a boy. Leave him alone.” 

Riga smiles at her again, and it is like the warm air that comes off a fire, shimmering and rippling and carrying her away from every unpleasant thing and her hands fall limp to her sides. 

“You should be saying that to him,” he says. 

“He is breakable,” Daji says, forces herself to look away from him, still sees the green-white afterimage of it. 

“So am I,” Riga says, burning at the edge of her vision. 

-

Ziya’s arm swells up in the days after, welts up red and then bruises a sickly green and then darkens to a bloody purple so deep it is almost black. 

Daji sits next to him in the dust, watches him prod at the fist-sized bump. “Stop that.” 

He grins at her, eyes ink-dark. “It doesn’t hurt, when you get used to it.” 

“Don’t,” she says forcefully, grabs his arm and ignores the little hiss of pain he lets out. “Don’t get used to it.” 

“What’s one more?” Ziya says, now not looking at her, curling inward. 

-

Riga keeps coming. Ziya keeps laughing. 

He brings things with him, food and clothes and frippery, things that Daji had told herself that she would never see again and now things that she has to tell herself not to trample into the dirt, because they live on the edge of the earth and there are so many others scrabbling for purchase. 

Ziya starts filling out, curling out and curling upward, and when he laughs, now, it does not shake with it. He will always be sharp and short and frail, for the rest of his life, always the thing that Daji fumbles for, bony spurs and blade-like elbows, for the rest of hers, but some of it is boy-skinny now, at least. 

So Daji watches. So she waits. So she waits for the other shoe to drop. 

It is when he brings her a hairpin- carved from shining dark wood, intricate designs picked out in wrought silver- that she closes her eyes and waits for the blow. 

“You can’t,” she says, does not move to take it even as everything in her wants to. 

“But I can,” Riga says, and he is still wearing his smile and she wants to rip it off his face and devour it. She wants to take his fine-carved angles in her hands and find out what he’s really carved out of. She wants to- well. 

(Daji _wants_. More fuel for the pyre.)

She snorts, snatches it out of his hand before he changes his mind. “I am not one of your court girls, Yin Riga.” 

“I don’t have court girls,” he says, infuriating, brilliant. 

-

Riga tells them both stories. 

(He is especially fond of the ones that happen to him. Daji will think it endearing. Much later, she will think it egocentric.)

“Tell the Pantheon one again,” Ziya whines, head propped up on one hand, eyes glazed over with boredom. “All you do is tell us about your father’s strategy meetings- it’s so _boring…”_

“It’s not boring, it’s important,” Riga snaps, but his shoulders unwind from themselves just a fraction and Daji knows that he’s agreed before he says it. 

He shifts a little in the damp grass and suddenly they are sitting pressed shoulder-to-shoulder and it is all she can do, then, to continue breathing. 

“Sometimes,” Riga begins, affects a grandly, distant tone that ill-fits the vestigial reediness of his voice. “Sometimes when you climb the tallest peaks in the land, reach the summit at just the right moment, and the light hits the thin clouds- that’s where the gods live. That’s where you see the Pantheon.” 

-

Daji is eighteen and she will not die here. 

“Do we have to?” Ziya says, twitchy, nervous, eyes the color of dried blood. 

“We don’t have a choice,” she says, lifts her head and tries to make herself colder than she feels. 

“I know,” he answers, something very old, suddenly, pricking at the corners of his mouth. “I just wanted to hear you say it.” 

-

The wind howls, unceasing, uncaring, and Daji fumbles for Ziya, feels the thin fabric of his tunic slip through her fingers- 

-

“You were both nearly dead when we found you,” a voice says, and Daji opens her eyes. 

Tseveri stares down at her, mouth twisted, eyes unimpressed. 

(Tseveri has a mouth like a whip and small quick hands and she is dryly funny and good in a fight. Daji thinks, much later, that they could’ve been friends.)

-

They are a week out from their flight when Riga walks into camp at the first pale crack of dawn and Daji puts a cold hand to Ziya’s too-eager mouth and hisses _be quiet,_ slips a dagger into her sleeve, and goes to meet him. 

“Daji,” he says, eyes like coins, flat and sheening, and behind him the light of the rising sun seems to hesitate in it. 

“Go home, Riga,” she says, feels the cool flat of the blade against the tips of her fingers. 

“But I’m right here,” he says, grins like a portent but Daji is still eighteen and Riga is still a fire and she mistakes him for a warm one. 

-

This is what happens when you call down the sky. 

The woman before her is beautiful, in the most horrible definition of the word- skin the color of clean ash and hair the color of the smoke before it, and she looks at Daji like she is the only thing in the world, like she is the single point of it all. 

The woman smiles, and her teeth are the fangs of a snake, curving-sharp and dripping poison and Daji imagines how those fangs would feel sinking into flesh. 

“I can give you nothing at all, Su Daji,” she says, says it like a hiss, says it in the voice of a woman who can start wars at noon and end them by dusk, enthralling, drowning. 

Daji smiles back. 

(She’s got fangs of her own.)

The boy-shaped thing before him looks like an ink painting come to life- his skin is the papery-translucent of rice paper, and the impossibly intricate patterns on his robes are worked solely in black and white. 

The boy-thing turns to look at him, and his eyes are flat and unmoving and lightless and when he moves there is the slightest hesitancy in it, like he’s planning out each step as he goes. 

“Oh, Jiang Ziya,” the boy-not-a-boy says, and the ink from his robes is soaking into his rice-paper skin, now, and Ziya watches as the darkness pools at his feet, watches as it seeps into the soles of his own- so cold it is like nothing at all. 

“I can give you everything,” and rising behind him is a gate, black-brassy with wear, taller than comprehension, the snarling bas-relief carvings on it madness given make. 

The boy-thing holds out a huge, intricate key in his dark, dripping hand, and grins with ink-stained mouth. 

Jiang Ziya is sixteen and he remembers breathing through the bloodstained fabric of his mother’s dress so the dark smoke settling low and hazy does not enter his lungs, remembers the faint frantic cadence of the Mugenese soldiers who had stood outside for hours, torches held under the door. 

Jiang Ziya is sixteen and when the boy smiles again his teeth screw tight, like keys fitting into place. 

The thing that stands before Riga (for that is what it is to him, a thing- because that is what most things are to him before he started pretending well enough) is a dragon only in the broadest sense. 

Beyond that- below that, crashing in on itself, whitecaps thrashing their soft claws onto unyielding rock- is power, thrumming in his bones, boiling in his blood, heady and sea-salt, the lowering of a thousand spears, edges keening. 

(Here is a question Riga should have asked: What are the spears pointing towards? Riga is the prodigal, the perennial, king once and future. He does not ask questions.)

“The ending,” Riga says, looks up at the thing, black-scaled and gold-scaled and nothing at all, just a thrum that fits so well in the marrow of him that he clenches it tight around him like a mantle and thinks _mine._

Something gleams, then, in the dragon’s eye. 

Riga is the most solid thing in the place. He will think this for the rest of his life. 

-

It is between one moment and the next. Daji is in that place-between-places, breathing hard, air like syrup under the forever of the Pantheon, and the next she is gasping up from it, sucking in air, crisp and cold, feeling the slate-flake of the plateau under her tunic. 

Riga is sitting beside her, and he turns to her and his eyes are dark-gold and black-gold and nothing at all and there is a thrum to him that wasn’t there before, tightly coiled in the whole of him, and this close she can tell by the way his teeth grind together that it is taking all of him to not shatter himself with it. 

She glances behind her. Ziya is still unconscious, a faint line of drool drying on his face. 

Riga is looking at her, now, something small and dark curling around his face and Daji wants to put her mouth to it, drink the darkness and the thing beneath it besides, blood and flesh and bone and marrow, and then whatever souls are made of. 

(Daji _wants_. More fuel for the pyre.)

“Don’t think too much about it,” Riga says, and the night is dark enough that she cannot see the light in his eyes. 

He kisses her like it is the end of something. Much later, she will laugh very much at it. 

-

(It goes very quickly, now.)

-

“The gods are not things, Yin Riga,” Tseveri says once. 

In answer, Riga twists his feet into the hard-packed dirt of the plateau and cracks it down to the bedrock. 

-

Riga is a very selfish sun. 

Ziya is clutching his iron staff in shaking hands, eyes the same color as Tseveri’s- the blue of a high, cloudless day. 

“I can’t do it,” he rasps, and Daji fumbles for him, manages only to catch the sleeve of his robe for a moment before Riga has him by the shoulders, hands digging into the flesh so tightly that she sees the line of Ziya’s jaw tighten. 

“You have to,” Riga says, low and rumbling, the angle of his cheek against Ziya’s, speaking into the curve of his neck. 

“I don’t want to,” Ziya croaks, right hand curling into the front of Riga’s robes, and if something wells up inside Daji at the sight of it it does not matter.

“You will,” Riga says, says it low and intricate but they all feel it in the bone anyways, and Ziya shakes himself, blinks like it is a dream he is waking up from, and walks over to the horse, eyes yellowed and rolling, foam flecking up on its frantic limbs. 

A small smirk darts out, just for a moment, onto Riga’s face. 

Ziya brings the staff down. 

“Were you jealous?” Riga says later, kisses the curve of her neck and it is like a brand. 

“Always,” Daji responds, and he laughs against the slope of her shoulder. 

“Do you love him?” she asks, watches Ziya and Tseveri, heads bowed close together, pale-on-pale, white-on-white. 

She glances at him, then, sees that same small smirk playing across his face.

“He certainly loves me,” Riga says, after a moment, and as if to punctuate curls a hand into the small of her back. 

“I can’t,” and this time when Daji fumbles for him she gets nothing but empty air. 

Riga says nothing, just places a hand on the small of Ziya’s back. 

The staff comes down. 

-

“You will _end,_ Yin Riga,” Tseveri spits, and the dark blood that comes with it mixes with the mud and in the end it is impossible to tell which is which. 

Riga laughs, kneels down next to her, brushes her hair from her face. 

“That’s what it all comes down to, doesn’t it?” 

-

The heart tastes like dust and iron and when Riga smiles at her his teeth screw together like a sword into a sheath. 

-

“What are you going to do, when you’re Emperor?” 

It is a warm, muggy night in the south- the kind of heat that creeps into crevices and stays there, sticky and moist- so warm, in fact, that they have foregone a fire, so close to the Mugenese encampment that when flickering torches catch right Daji can make out the glint of the dim light in the eyes of the soldiers. 

Riga stays silent for more time than makes her at ease with it, and in the near-dark she digs her hands into her robes, wills it not to roil and rumble and swallow her whole. 

“Everything,” he says finally. “I want to do everything.” 

Ziya laughs, and in the not-light she sees the pale fringe of his head on the line of Riga’s shoulder. 

“I want a palace, Riga,” he says, says it strange and light and peculiar, in that lilting tone that seems to seep into him some odd days. “I want a menagerie. Red birds and white tigers and snakes black as ink.” 

“Nothing else?” Riga replies, traces a line down the slack of Ziya’s jaw, sets his other hand on the back of Daji’s neck and traces the contours of the knobby bone there. 

“What else would I need with it?” Ziya says, and even though his face is slack and open she watches his hands, watches them clench and unclench, twitching, reaching, wanting. 

(Ziya _wants._ Tinder, match, strike.) 

“Then you,” Riga says, into the hollow of her neck, breath hot and dry. “What an empress you will be.” 

Daji closes her eyes and does not pretend that she does not deserve it. 

-

She watches them, blazing sun, icy comet, planet caught. 

(Much later, she’ll realize she got it all wrong.) 

-

They watch the Hesperian ships, hanging low and stately in the sky, reminding Daji suddenly of dead fish in the marketplace, rotting in the noonday heat. 

Riga points his sword up at them, laughs in disbelief. 

“Are these their gods, then?” he says. “These dead things?” 

“No god,” Ziya says, iron staff scraping white crevices into the soft stone, “would cage themselves in a dead thing like that.” 

“They soak up the sky,” Riga says, almost petulant with it. 

“Then,” Ziya replies, eyes the color of dead scales. “I will rid it of them.” 

-

The Gates open like the sun rising too close to the earth. 

-

“Your gods,” says the Hesperian priest-woman, the curve of her mouth like fishhooks. “How do they work? How do they grant your boons?” 

Daji laughs, throws her head back like a scream comes with it. 

“You think they are boons, priest-woman?” 

-

(Faster, now. Quickly.) 

-

Riga holds the Red Emperor’s head tight, winds his long black hair around his clenched fist and holds the thing up to the assembled crowd and the roar that emanates from them is so loud that Daji has to grit her teeth through it. 

“Long live Yin Riga,” they chant, slamming boots and shields and spears into cobblestone, so forceful dust shakes from the red-stone eaves of the fortress. “Long live Yin Riga. Long live the Dragon.” 

Riga smiles, great and shallow and in the shadow of the fortress Daji can finally see the teeth behind it. 

“Long live Yin Riga,” she whispers to him, later, places her hands on both sides of his face, feels the thrum of the power beneath him, feels the heat of his skin against hers. 

He turns his head, presses his mouth to her palm.

“...Yes,” he says after a long moment, leans into Daji’s touch and suddenly his hands are on her, burning. 

“Long live Yin Riga,” he breathes into the dip of her collarbones, his hands on the curve of her hips, searing into the whole of her, and she closes her eyes, falls into the thrum of him and does not pretend that she does not deserve it. 

-

She finds Ziya in the gardens, watches the way the greening light catches on the white shock of his hair, watches how his shoulders twitch under the fine silk of his robe. 

“Ziya,” she says, and when he turns to her his eyes are dark and inscrutable and suddenly the line of him is against her chest, knobby and sharp still, even through fine silk and finer time, and she can do nothing but stroke down the line of his back and wait for him to come back to himself. 

“Daji,” he breathes, short and blunt, curls away from her into himself and she cannot catch him (has not been able to, for a very long time.) 

“Burn yourself up on something else,” Daji says, very softly and very sweetly, because this is wartime but Ziya still has whelp-of-hunger carved into himself, even if the hunger, now, is of a different sort. 

He looks at her, desperate and raw and she cannot pretend that he does not deserve it. 

“He loves you,” she says, in the end. 

“Not like that,” he murmurs, eyes at once poison-green and black-gold and then nothing at all. “You know,” he says, and she catches the brand it is meant to be before it sinks into her, “You know it’s not like that.” 

“And it should be enough,” Daji says, feels guilt and elation in measure. “But it never will be, will it?” 

Ziya turns his face away and does not say anything at all. 

-

(We have only so much time left.) 

-

“I hate you,” Daji says, feels the roil of it, bitter and ink, coating the back of her mouth. 

“I know,” Riga says, burning iridescent on the backs of her eyelids. 

“I love you,” Daji murmurs into his chest, trails her hands down his back. 

“I know,” Riga says, and kisses her like something is unfolding with it. 

“Sit down, Ziya,” Riga snarls, wrenches his head back, bares his teeth. 

Ziya smiles at him, the thing traveling from one side of his face to another in starts and bursts. 

(It is a bad day. Riga has bags under his eyes and Ziya’s drift too often for him to be completely there and Daji’s hands won’t stop shaking.) 

“And if I won’t?” and Daji brings the roil to the surface, lets it settle on the thinnest layer between her and her skin, wonders then if she could distract Riga enough to let Ziya get away. 

Riga shoves him to the ground roughly, and Ziya falls, still looking up at Riga like he is anything else than what he is. 

“We’ve wasted too much time already,” Riga says, looks down at the struggling buck dispassionately. 

-

The heart tastes like dust and iron and this time Daji is the one that lets her face split with it, feels black blood running down, feels, beneath it, the fangs that slice into her flesh. 

-

“I hate you,” Ziya says, spine a bloody line against his back, mouth twisted ink-dark, his iron staff gripped white and bloodless in his hand. 

“I know,” Riga says, the ridge of his knuckles flecked with red. 

“I love you,” Ziya gasps, and it is a late night and by the roll of his eyes he is halfway between dreaming and waking, already walking that well-worn path to the other place, and he’s gripping the front of Riga’s robes, twisting them into his hands like the most solid thing in the place. 

“I know,” Riga says, and winds an arm around his waist. 

-

She watches them. Comets burn up if they get too close to the sun. 

(Burn slowly.) 

-

“You,” Ziya snarls, and Daji watches the seams around him unfold with it, the clawing madding faces of the Emperor’s Menagerie, ink into blood, how Ziya seems to grow paler with it. 

“Oh, Ziya,” Riga says, and he is so bright it hurts to look at, and how could he have ever been anything other than the merciless sun? “Are you going to kill me, Ziya?” 

Ziya howls. Riga laughs. 

Daji lets the roil go. 

-

(Not much farther to go, now.) 

-

Ziya still looks at Riga like he is anything other than what he is. Daji looks at him and sees the pyre. 

(Riga _burns._ Too quickly for it not to hurt.) 

The Speerly looks up at him, eyes wide, breaths coming heavy but she does not rattle with it, her hands steady, clenched at her sides- and beneath her, burning up, the fire, the flood. 

Riga laughs. Ziya’s mouth twists. Daji catches him. 

“A shame,” Riga says, holding the Speerly by the neck, head tilted, eyes great and dark. “A shame that Speer ends like this, don’t you think, Ziya?” 

-

If Daji looked very closely, she could always spot the opening of it. Riga never could. 

-

“He can’t kill me,” Ziya croaks, smile skittering across his face, like a lock breaking in two. “Hurry.” 

Daji lets the roil boil over. 

-

(This is the thing about dragons. They do not breathe fire.) 

-

Daji sees the sparking flare first. Then she sees the airships. 

(Old gods killed by dead gods tied to the pyre by mortal ones besides.) 

-

Ziya is slipping away and Riga is slipping towards and Daji sits beside Ziya in the gardens, watches the way his eyes flick and skip, how his mouth twitches at things no one besides him can hear. 

“Perhaps you are the closest of all of us,” she murmurs, “because the greatest of your sins are all for love.” 

-

“I’m leaving,” Ziya says. 

“Where to?” Daji responds, and in her mind’s eye she is ever-pulling the mantle tighter around herself. 

“Anywhere,” he says, does not meet her eyes and she does not want him to. 

“You could come with me, you know,” he offers, after a moment, but they are far too old, now, to entertain notions. 

“No,” she says. “I couldn’t.” 

Ziya nods. 

(She does not reach for him. She will not catch him.) 

-

Rin walks away from the rough stack of stones and does not look back. 

It will stand there, then, at the foot of the mountain, for a week or a month or a year, and then the stones will scatter and fall, quicker than most empires, and it will be like everything else in the place. 

-

_Here comes eternity_ , Nezha thinks, and does not look back. 

**Author's Note:**

> -this turned out so long and for what the last 48 hours have just been me checking the word count on my google docs and going "you have problems and issues"  
> -anyone who's ever told you that cooking for yourself makes the food taste better is a lying liar because the same principle applies to writing and i feel like ive just eaten a brunch at IHOP with the kids crayons mixed in  
> -and remember. i post. for ME *passes out*


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